The Israeli security firm has approved a radical change in military strategy in Gaza, after a year and a half of conflict. The operation called “Gédéon trolleys” now provides for the occupation and the maintenance of Israeli forces in the conquered areas, abandoning the tactics of temporary raids. “We are going from a system of raids to conquer territories with maintenance of presence,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the meeting of the cabinet. This new approach meets criticisms concerning the previous operations, where Israeli soldiers lost their lives to resume areas already “cleaned” and then abandoned, allowing Hamas to reinstall themselves.
The Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich said that Israel “will not withdraw from the conquered territories, even in exchange for hostages”, a position which caused the anger of the families of the 59 hostages still detained. The latter maintain that “military pressure leads to the death of hostages, while the agreements allow their release”. The TSAhal spokesperson, Brigadier General Effi Dafrin, however, said that the objective of the operation was “to increase pressure on Hamas to bring him to negotiate the release of hostages”. He assured that hostages “are always our priority” and that the two missions – “dismantle Hamas and recover hostages” – are “intrinsically linked”.
The operation should not start immediately, in particular due to the upcoming visit by American president Donald Trump in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. It will also require the mobilization of tens of thousands of reservists, which raises questions about the equity of the military burden while the government is simultaneously seeking to exempt from service ultra-Orthodoxes.
The plan also provides a new mechanism for distributing humanitarian aid under international supervision to prevent Hamas from controlling resources, as well as the evacuation of Palestinian civilians south of the Gaza Strip.
